The economics and politics of instability, empire, and energy, with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, plus other random blather and my wonderful wonderful wife. And I’d like a cigar right now.

10:28: “I would certainly not do first strike ... I would certainly not take anything off the table.” Huh? And now he wants us to outsource North Korea policy to China.

10:27: “We can’t defend Japan.” WTF?

10:26: “Your president.” Oh boy. He can’t help himself.

10:16: She is ignoring the “take the oil” comment. Mistake? I really have no goddamned idea. You can’t, of course, “take the oil” with only 10,000 troops, considering as the oil needs to be exported through hostile territory. You also can’t, well, take Syrian oil wells by occupying Iraq; the Islamic State’s oil revenues come from Syria.

10:11: That 400-pound hacker image is going to be very hard to wash out of my mind.

10:09: Was it a missed opportunity to miss talking about the Central Park Five? I suppose not; after all, I had only just moved to California when it all happened. It probably doesn't resonate for most of the country.

10:06: I have no idea how this would fly in a room of white swing voters. It isn’t going over well in a room full of black people.

10:02: “I say nothing.” Whoa! That was ... whoa. Really? Nothing to say to black people about birtherism?

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@9:26. She let it pass. What is it with liberals and this "reality-based" stuff? No one is gonna care about her Brock goon squad of fact checkers. A lot of white men have checked out of "reality" for the duration. She needs to humiliate him, not let that *pass*.

Trump bit at anything dangled. He only had a few things that will really bite him though. The problem is more he came across as Donald Trump, reality star and business guy, rather than President Trump.

Whether or not it matters to the electorate at large or not, remains to be seen.

The debate clarified to me that people who think that the US faces a dismal future have a champion in Trump. It is likely that many of the people who feel the US faces a dismal future despise him, but in their eyes, they feel that he "gets it," and is willing to be a change agent to reverse this decline.

My verdict is that I have no clue what the liberals I see on Twitter are thinking. I thought it was nothing short of a catastrophe for Clinton. She grinned like a loon the entire time, letting one outrageous bit of insanity after another sail by her. Except for saying that her "fact-checkers" would be handling all the lies! Limp.

I don't think it was strategy either. If she was going to really expose the post-Labor Day-only types to how awful his personality is, she could have called him out on his bullying and his interruptions. If she was only concerned with a late change of heart from Kissinger, for the all-important imperialist war criminal vote, she would have called him out on "no first use/nothing off the table", which is both a contradiction and a violation of long-held imperialist shibboleths. She is just an incompetent campaigner, and a very weak one.

She got lucky, again. Because this setback might just keep it at a 1-3 point race, her favor. If this was Kasich, or even Cruz? She'd have been done as of last night.

Politics aside I have a lot of sympathies with the other tribe (non-liberals) but I doubt Kasich or Cruz would be doing any better against Clinton.

In a race where both candidates are politicians and both are abiding by the decorum and rules of the governing class, you wouldn't gain enough support from college educated whites to counter the weaker support among non-college educated whites. I don't seriously take the suggestion that a typical Republican will do much better than Romney among non-white voting groups.

My model is simple. If DT wins, it is on the back of a huge win among non-college white males. The "missing white voter" model that grew up as the fascist counterpoint to the Romney postmortem. The HRC counter to that is to exploit the known Trump weaknesses among college-educated white people.

You have to enter the white guy mindset. The rightsphere has been abuzz for a while now with rumours that Hillary had a serious stroke, or is dying of cancer, or was replaced with a ringer a while back because of A or B. When I watched this, I was accompanied by a white male, not even of right-wing bent, who said "she looks like she had a stroke! Why is she just so passive?"

We live in an age when the Overton Window has moved further and further rightward, and has never crept even an inch back left. Trump's outrageous lies, right-wing nostrums, and trickle-down bullshit has to be *challenged*. We have come a long way from "voodoo economics", when this stuff could just be assumed to be radical, set against a sorta-Keynesian norm.

All I saw him do was repeat the usual GOP nonsense, demagogue The Brown, and bully her by interruptions etc. None of those things hurt him with white males, maybe especially the latter. Sad but true, if he just got up there and called her a bitch, he'd spike another 5 points with white guys who have been told exactly that for literally 25 years now.

TL;DR I don't think he can be sunk by himself. Gotta throw him a rock.

I don't think that's quite right. The white guys you describe are in the tank for Trump from a perverse combination of a cult-of-personality and narrow identity politics. Nothing Hillary could have done would shake that.

But she could have easily played into misogynistic stereotypes. Instead, she lured Trump into trap after trap and let him sink himself. There was certainly no passivity: after all, she called him a racist and pulled out the Machado incident at exactly the right time.

In other words, matching him rude-for-rude would have accomplished nothing. Trump's incivility was quite obvious. Matching it would have allowed people to call her "thin-skinned" and cost her sympathy.

We'll have to see what happens in the polls, of course. Your first assessment ("catastrophe") has now been falsified. It is still possible, however, that she won't receive a substantial bounce. Soon we will know.

I'll admit, it seems ironic that you think she should call him out on incivility but think I should have refrained from calling out someone wearing a Hitler costume to a children's party. But don't explain: it adds to your aura of mystery!

Noel, I'm not saying its impossible to elect a Republican President. A bad enough recession, the year before a general election might do it.

It is difficult to win national elections with a party whose base voters are motivated by pessimism and estrangement from the new America. I don't see the Republican base becoming less pessimistic or estranged over the next 4-8 years under Clinton.

I think Republicans are waiting on an exogenous event to give them the Presidency. That's probably their only game.

Just to clarify, I don't mean matching rudeness with rudeness. My ideal? Answering about half his stuff with a simple "My fellow Americans, this is what a crazy racist looks like", followed by ignoring him and promising single-payer.

This gets you a few non-college white guys, and it consolidates the college educated, all of them pretty much. To the extent these quadrennial rituals can move the needle at all, that's how she moves it.